`Trainspotting' Rises Above Controversy

------------------------------------------------------------------ Movie review

XXXX "Trainspotting," with Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Kevin McKidd, Kelly Macdonald. Directed by Danny Boyle, from a script by John Hodge. Egyptian. "R" - Restricted because of drug use, strong language, sex, nudity, some violence. ------------------------------------------------------------------

The morality of this Scottish sensation will be debated for as long as it's in the public eye, which is likely to be for many years.

Locally the arguments began last month when the movie had its premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival, where the audience voted it two awards: best picture and director. But there were many dissenting voices, most of them critical of the film's view of heroin addiction. They argue that it presents heroin in far too positive a light, and that it romanticizes drug abuse.

To which I must ask: Did we see the same movie?

For all the film's stylish and imaginative "trip sequences," the downside of heroin is never underestimated or underplayed. When the junkie protagonist, Mark Renton, quits cold turkey, he is haunted by sickening visions. One of his friends dies of AIDS, while the hideous death of a baby neglected by his drug-taking parents devastates the survivors. When a fed-up judge sarcastically refers to "victimless crimes" while sentencing Renton and another shoplifting addict, he speaks from a range of experience that can't be denied.

What the film does suggest is that some people choose heroin because, for all its risks and horrors, it is almost impossible to resist. Is this such a difficult concept? As Renton points out, they shoot up "for the pleasure of it" - an overwhelming pleasure that makes sexual orgasm seem minor. Heroin gives them a rush they can't find anywhere else in their dead-end lives. It's also a form of rebellion against the status quo.

Played by Ewan McGregor in a raw, funny, star-making performance, Renton is a boy driven to get high - even to the extent of diving into the filthiest toilet in Scotland to fetch the opium suppositories he's deposited there. This scene will be too much for some, but it's not gratuitous (it brilliantly suggests just how far addicts will go to score a hit) and its surreal hilarity outweighs its grossness.

Robert Carlyle, last seen as the gay priest's lover in "Priest," proves his versatility again as the boozing, homophobic, psychotic Begbie, who won't touch heroin - though his horrific reappearance in Renton's life drags the boy back into drug abuse as well as drug dealing. Ewen Bremner and Jonny Lee Miller are spunkily authentic as Renton's doped-up pals, Spud and Sick Boy, and 17-year-old Kelly Macdonald is wonderfully mischievous as Renton's schoolgirl lover.

The litany, "choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family," is as much of a joke to these characters as "Just say no." The makers of "Trainspotting" craftily place us within that mindset for a couple of hours - while suggesting that other addictions, including Renton's mother's reliance on pills and Begbie's alcoholic barroom binges (the movie drips with irony when he says he won't let his body be destroyed by the "poison" of heroin), are no better.

In the end, I had fewer moral qualms about "Trainspotting" than I did about "A Time to Kill," Hollywood's wildly overpraised new vigilante thriller, which proposes, without any room for ambiguity, that premeditated murder in a good cause should be acceptable in a court of law.

Expressively written by John Hodge and directed with an irresistible youthful energy by Danny Boyle, "Trainspotting" shows us why people are attracted to hard drugs, in a more graphic, vivid way than even Gus Van Sant's exemplary "Drugstore Cowboy." And it demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt why it's not worth it.